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Syracuse's Jerami Grant takes and makes a rare jumper in the second half of a third-round NCAA tournament game against Dayton on Saturday March 22, 2014 at the First Niagara Center in Buffalo. Dayton won 55-53 to advance to the Sweet 16.
(Dennis Nett | dnett@syracuse.com)

Buffalo, N.Y. — They'd dangled over the side of that offensive cliff for a long time, hanging onto that fraying rope that had threatened to snap at any moment. They'd twisted, they'd kicked, they'd swayed.

But they hadn't fallen to the rocks below. Not until Saturday evening, that is. Not until the clanging and the doinking proved to be too much at First Niagara Center where that old rope finally gave way.

Jim Boeheim's guys missed too many shots . . . again. And this time, against a combative bunch of Dayton Flyers in a frenzied Round-of-32 NCAA tournament game before a ranting house of 19,260, it cost them dearly.

The Syracuse University Orange clanked 33 of its 54 field-goal attempts, including all 10 from beyond the arc, and now its season — the one that began at 25-0 and ended at 3-6 — is done. Done because SU, which held the Flyers to 55 points, managed only 53 itself. Done and already being mourned.

"I don't even know what it was," said Jerami Grant, Syracuse's sophomore forward who'd squeezed off just three shots (and scored merely four points) in his 34 minutes on the floor. "We just didn't come to play. We weren't ready. We're the better team and we came out and we weren't prepared like we should have been."

Asked to expand on that thought, Grant couldn't.

"I can't really explain it," he said. "We were missing shots, but at the same time we probably should have taken the ball to the basket a lot more. It was a tough game. We had an opportunity to win the game and we, uh, messed it up."

The Orange could have stolen it, of course. If this had been Pittsburgh in February rather than Buffalo in March, perhaps Tyler Ennis' 3-pointer from just outside the circle with some seven seconds on the clock would have fallen . . . and SU would have survived and advanced . . . and all of Central New York would be anticipating that Sweet 16 later this week in Memphis.

But, no. The kid's dead-on shot was a tad long, the result was Syracuse's 10th and final splat from the great beyond and the reality was that a very quiet bus ride into a very dark night awaited what once had been the No. 1-ranked squad in the land.

"I'm thinking it's good," said Grant. "We've been in that situation a couple of times and Tyler has been able to come through for us. It was a tough shot. You can't fault him for taking it."

No, you couldn't. Not if you are of sound mind. In fact, you couldn't fault Ennis, the gifted freshman-who-plays-and-acts-like-a-senior, for much of anything beyond his aim, especially in the second half during which he scored 17 points by burying six of his dozen shots.

But then his last one, his unlucky 13th after the break, bounded off the rim and took with it the hopes and dreams of a l-o-n-g campaign that had begun, for all practical purposes, seven months and one day earlier up in Canada when the barnstorming Orange drilled poor McGill by 40.

Much will be made, of course, of that miss. But while this contest (and season) officially ended with it, the painful defeat might have been earned in the first half which looked like something out of 1904 when SU was beating clubs like Potsdam Normal 29-11 and the Batavia YMCA 23-13.

Indeed, when that thing ended (mercifully) at 20-18, the trailing Orange had matched its 18 points by enjoying a lead for all of 18 seconds.

"We started out the game slow," said Christmas. "We started coming around in the second half, but by then it was too late."

Too late and, ultimately, too few. Only once all season had this Syracuse bunch scored fewer than 53 points. And maybe not even once in all of their nightmares did the SU athletes envision an attack that produced 40 points from the paint, 11 points from the free-throw line . . . and two points — two — from outside the lane.

Stunning, it was. And it didn't go unnoticed.

"The only thing we could make was a lay-up," said Boeheim. "Sooner or later, to win, you've got to make something from the perimeter. You can give Dayton credit, and that's good. But we had some open looks and we didn't make them. That's really, pretty much, basically, what happened."